Hailing President Summers
The Los Angeles Times reports on the event that we noted via the Harvard Crimson in "Resignation and resistance" last night: "Students hail Harvard president." Reader Jack Lifton asks us to quote the last three paragraphs of the Times story:
...Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College who left under pressure from Summers, said campus politics here had been shifting for decades, as more students from less affluent backgrounds enrolled.Jack comments:A more diverse group, they are also "eager to prosper and less willing to take risks by rebelling," Lewis said. His upcoming book, "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," traces what he considers to be the decline in the quality of education at Harvard. It's left them far more likely to support the power structure, he said.
"The Harvard student body looks more like America than the Harvard faculty," he said. "That's what's happened."
The statement by a man who felt he could not remain on a faculty headed up by Summers unwittingly wrote an epitaph not only for the hard left wing of the Harvard faculty but also for the hard left wing of the Democratic Party.Jack's seems to me the optimistic take on the fantasy world of the likes of Harry Lewis. (Courtesy of Lucianne.)
